Beyond White Guilt by Sarah Maddison

Author:Sarah Maddison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Issues
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2011-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

I don’t mean white people should hate themselves for having pale skin, for something we were born with. I think we white people should sometimes hate ourselves for what we do, or don’t do, in the world, for the choices we make about our white skin . . . We live in a white supremacist society and benefit from white privilege. We should hate that fact, and if we haven’t done enough to change that world, well . . .

And there, says Jensen, is the rub. The fact that whiteness still allows and even normalises the domination of some groups over others ‘should cause us discomfort, everyday’.37 Ideally, this discomfort will at the very least prompt those of us who are white to undertake sustained self-examination that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which race and white privilege continue to affect our lives and our individual and collective relationships with Indigenous people.38 The point is not for non-Indigenous Australians to feel bad about themselves. Rather, as a means of dealing with feelings of guilt, it is possible for non-Indigenous Australians to simultaneously maintain a positive view of their group while also interrogating their whiteness and acknowledging the need to address past injustice in order to enable adaptive change. These two positions are not incompatible.39

Even for white people themselves, Australian whiteness is not without its problems. These problems are tied to the question of moral legitimacy that in turn stems from our colonial past. What has often been termed the ‘cultural cringe’ in Australia is an expression of the cultural connections to Britain that many non-Indigenous Australians retain. This type of ‘yearning for identity’ is common in settler colonial states, where emulating European cultural practices enables the denial of much that has taken place in the colonised society. Privileging particular expressions and symbols of whiteness in this way offers the coloniser ‘a sense of certainty and stability’, and supports the reclamation of power from those who have been dispossessed.40 But maintaining a sense of Britishness in Australia also produces a certain incoherence in the settler self, an incoherence that proves problematic for the imagining of a unitary nation. For the imagined Australian nation to make sense, it must continue to rely on ‘a racialised social formation predicated on whiteness’.41 Australian white identity is based on control of the land, of cultural expression and of language, necessitating the public performance of ‘authority, respectability, and ownership’.42

Developing a deeper understanding of the myriad ways in which whiteness and white privilege continue to shape our national identity, and therefore how this identity continues to exclude Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, should enable us to perhaps use our privilege to make personal, community and systemic change.43 But translating a new-found understanding about ourselves into effective action is not without potential pitfalls. Even white anti-racists are ‘shaped by settler-colonial histories and contemporary political discourse’.44 Simply attempting to address inequity through anti-racism can lead to a focus on the subject of racism (Indigenous people), which still allows white ‘complicity in the dynamics of racism’ to remain unexamined.

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